It is known to provide a plurality of removable ceiling tiles which are installed in adjacent fashion as an aesthetic ceiling spacedly underneath the structural ceiling of a room, whereby the aesthetic ceiling does not support any structural load. Water conduits, electrical wires and other miscellaneous building equipment can be located between the aesthetic ceiling tiles and the structural ceiling, without being apparent from the room per se. Light material, such as electric or phone wires or the like, can even be supported by the aesthetic ceiling tiles.
To support the ceiling tiles, an array of perpendicular thin metallic or plastic rails is often used, with a number of rectangular openings being defined between the rails to receive the tiles. Each tile is thus supported by gravity on its four sides by the rails, with each rail having a pair of parallel adjacent horizontal flat load-bearing elongated side legs to peripherally support the tiles. The rails downwardly depend from the structural room ceiling and are attached thereto by metallic wire or the like.
To install a tile on the rails, it must be inserted through an opening between the rails and then rotated and tilted so that it comes to rest on the load-bearing rails. Likewise, to remove a tile from the rails, the tile must be manually lifted to disengage the rails, and then rotated and tilted so that it may be passed through its opening. However, this is often much more complex than it may seem, since there are often a large number of wires and miscellaneous gear over the ceiling tiles, including light casings, air ducts, phone and electric wires, etc . . . . Thus, the space required to rotate and tilt the ceiling tile often lacks, and the tile must be forced through its opening by slightly resiliently deforming the tile and sliding it through the surrounding rails. Since these tiles are often made of semi-rigid cardboard-like material, it is only very slightly flexible, and the removal/installation operations effectively result in damaging the fragile tile due to its frictional sliding engagement against the surrounding rails.
Another disadvantage of these suspended ceiling rails and tiles is that it is difficult to modify the already installed suspended ceiling configuration, such as in showrooms or the like wherein the ceiling configuration can be modified rather frequently. This is especially true in the case of irregular suspended ceiling configurations, where the ceiling is curved so as to present original aesthetic configurations.